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Thursday, January 4, 2018

For Christmas this year, I somehow convinced my wife that we should give her cousin and his kids the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition starter set... and further that I should buy and paint up a set of miniatures to use with it.

Now, this new D&D set is a "theater of the mind" sort of thing (also known as cheap), so no fold out maps, no tokens or stands. It barely has dice. So I really wanted to juice it up for them and make it seem more exciting. Thus the miniatures, and I also made a whole map pack of the Sword Coast for the cousin, who will be the DM of the group. (and that is why I made the Faerûn travel distances matrix). I went a bit deep with the maps and such, and got about 20 pages of material, including a DM screen that I found somewhere online when looking for travel distances, and I also bought a set of dice for each of the kids.

Anyway, as the kids range from 3 to 8 years old, I knew that I wanted to use Bones miniatures, and began by reading the pre-generated character sheets, which happily are gender neutral. After a few lunch times worth of trawling through the Reaper online catalog, I ordered some miniatures from a seller on Ebay, and set to work. I made a few conversions, mostly to remove the more egregiously bendy weapons, but also to shift them more in the direction of the starting equipment.

Now, I figured that my own kids might want to play too, and so they needed their own figures (and character sheets, which I wrote up). So I added a barbarian and a Gnome fighter to the group.

Thankfully no changes

And I also painted up a henchman/torch bearer and a donkey, because every D&D group needs someone to do the dangerous work for them, and I hope that having miniatures for them will help the group to remember this important fact.

I had a pretty good time painting these, although as always it was a bit of a rush at the end to get them done in time. The wilderness type bases were a lot of fun to do, and if you look closely, you can see there is quite a bit going on there.

Anyway, so there is most of my hobby work for the month. What about you, did you make any miniatures to gift?

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Had a great New years weekend get away at the Wife's cousins' place, and managed to play a couple of games of Settlers: Trails to Rails, although lost badly both times. The countdown to 2018 was serenaded by my youngest losing her dinner, so good times there.